Working Through Colonial Collections

What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s various work practices, this book highlights the Museum’s embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum’s everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum’s present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.

Museums and Digital Culture: From Reality to Digitality in the Age of COVID-19

Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From interdisciplinary perspectives across digital culture, art, and technology, we investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture, looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We focus on human digital behavior, experience, and interaction in museums in the context of art, artists, and human engagement with art, using the observational perspectives of the authors as a basis for discussion. Our research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation, about which this paper presents a landscape view of its characteristics and challenges. Our evidence shows that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched, underscoring the central importance of an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality.

Over and Over and Over Again

Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE OLBIAN COINS OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 4TH CENTURY BC.

Since the beginning of the XXI century, the amount of available for the researchers numismatic material has increased significantly, so introducing a new types of coins into the scientific circulation has become an especially relevant in modern numismatics, even when the archaeological context of most of these finds is almost lost. The study of ancient numismatics of Olbia is rapidly gaining in modern Ukraine. At the beginning of the XX century, ancient numismatics already had some significant achievements, but the accumulated material required urgent cataloging and systematization. During last 10 years since the publication of the most important and thorough catalog of ancient coins by Vladlen Opanasovich Anokhin, as well as the results of cataloging Olbia coins by other researchers - Valery Nechitaylo and Grigory Makandarov, numismatics has been enriched by new previously unknown coin types. The aim of the study. The main purpose of the article is to introduce into the scientific circulation new varieties of Olbia coins and to compile the most complete classification of Olbia coins of the IV century BC. Research methodology. In the process of scientific elaboration of the topic general scientific methods were used: analytical, chronological, and topographical, as well as source methods: critical, metrological and iconographic. A systematic approach to the processing of modern finds from private collections and access to the collections of foreign museums was the impetus for writing an expanded classification work. The scientific novelty. The value of the processed materials is that they not only complement this group of coins, but also refine previously published types in unsatisfactory condition, where incorrect reading of the names and trinkets has led to inaccuracies. The Conclusions. The so-called «obol series» covers the period of the Olbia minting around 350-330 BC. The monetary system consists of four denominations: obol (on the coin field depicts Demeter and the eagle on the dolphin), dikhalk (on the coin field depicts Demeter and the eagle on the dolphin), hulk (on the coin field depicts Demeter and the ear, dolphin) and hemihalk (depicts Demeter and dolphin). The die analysis allowed to divide the coins of Olbia of the IV century BC senior denomination for two stylistic groups. According to the results of our own research, we were able to determine the following number of varieties of each of these denominations: obols – 24 types, dikhalks - 6 types, hulks - 6 types, hemihalks - 2 types. We see the prospect of further research in the introduction into scientific circulation of new previously undiscovered varieties of Olbian coins from little-studied sources - materials of museum collections in Ukraine and abroad, among numismatic rarities sold at numismatic auctions and private collections.

Women’s Hairstyles and Head Ornamentation of the Yakuts in the 18th century

Mass Christianization of the peoples of Yakutia (Eastern Siberia) at the end of the 18th century led to the development of a demotic Christianity throughout the 19th century. There were new rules, according to which a woman was not permitted to appear in public with her head uncovered, and therefore the marking function of the hairstyles became obsolete. This could explain the absence of rituals and rules associated with women’s hair and hairstyles in the Yakut culture of the 19th–20th centuries. The aim of this study is to prove a hypothesis, according to which pendants of hair ornamentation duplicate braids, and studying the pendants of the headrest ‘nachel’nik’ allows recreation of women’s hairstyle that had been in use before the period of mass Christianization. The article is based on the analysis of written, material, and visual sources of the 18th–19th centuries. Information about the hairstyles and adornments of the Yakuts is contained within the records of travelers of the 18th–19th centuries. Among the ethnographic works on the peoples of Siberia, one can find drawings depicting maidens and women, where particular attention is given to their hair. These materials were correlated with the data of the archaeological excavations of Yakut female burials of the 18th century. The obtained results were compared with the materials from the 19th century — photographs of women in national costumes and jewelry from museum collections. According to the results of the study, it can be stated that there was a tradition of changing maiden’s hairstyle to woman’s hairstyle in the context of the wedding ritualism. New rules of conduct, social roles, especially regulations on the appearance of women, were formalized in the society in the 19th century with the mass Christianization of the peoples of Yakutia. There were new rules, according to which a woman was not permitted to appear in public with her head uncovered, and therefore the marking function of hairstyles became obsolete. This could explain the absence of rituals and rules associated with women’s hair and hairstyles in the Yakut culture of the 19th–20th centuries.

International Magic?

This paper explores international aspects of Finnish folk magic. Folk magic objects in two Finnish museum collections (the National Museum of Finland and Museum Centre Vapriikki) are compared to analogous objects in the Nordiska museet in Sweden and the Pitt Rivers Museum in the UK to reveal the collections’ resemblances and differences. The material in question dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many similar objects occur in these collections. Explanations for this are sought in historical networks between peoples. Yet a closer inspection also reveals variation in practices and beliefs. This reveals the dynamic nature of folk magic traditions, although collection and curation policies also play a role. Moreover, the complex connections between religion, medicine, and magic are uncovered.

Large ants are not easy – the taxonomy of Dinoponera Roger (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Ponerinae)

The taxonomy of the giant ants of the genus Dinoponera is revised based on female and male morphology. Eight species are recognized. Dinoponera nicinha sp. nov., from Amazonas and Rondônia, Brazil, is described and D. grandis (Guérin-Méneville, 1838) is revived. The species D. australis Emery, 1901 and D. snellingi Lenhart, Dash & Mackay, 2013, plus the subspecies D. australis bucki Borgmeier, 1937 and D. australis nigricolor Borgmeier, 1937 are synonymized under D. grandis sp. rev. An unnamed and unidentified male is reported. In general, male morphology has greater and more discrete variation than in females, but they are scarce in museum collections. Species distributions are updated and illustrated, the genus ranging from southern Colombia to northern Argentina, with no reliable records from the Guiana Shield and all nominal species occurring in Brazil. Intraspecific variation and natural history are discussed. New illustrated identification keys are provided for both sexes. Future studies should address the collection of fresh specimens for molecular work and to assess the conservation status of several species and populations.

The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive

Colorization describes the digitization and retrospective addition of color to photographic and film materials (celluloid nitrate, glass negatives) initially made and circulated in a black-and-white format. Revisiting the controversial 1980s colorization of 24 classic Hollywood studio titles, which incited debate over questions of copyright, authorship and artistic expression, this essay examines the use of colorization to interpret museum collections for new audiences. The aesthetics of colorization have been criticized for prioritizing image content over the history of film technologies, practices and exhibition. An examination of They Shall Not Grow Old (Jackson, 2018) finds a use of digital editing and coloring techniques in the colorization of First World War film footage held in the Imperial War Museum archives that is familiar to the director’s fiction films. Jackson’s film is a commemorative project, yet the “holistic unity” of authorial technique operates across fragments of archive film and photographs to imbricate of fiction and nonfiction, signaling vital questions around the ethics and ideologies of “natural color”, historiography, and the authenticity of materials and spectator experience.

The Virtual Applications in Support of the Studying in the Field of Visual Arts

Art education is based upon learning about cultural heritage and art masterpieces mostly through reproductions. The development of virtual and mixed reality platforms leads to variety of more and more learning apps that allow the students and pupils to explore different museum collections, antic cities and treasures from all around the world without leaving their classroom. This leads to a better quality of education for those who can’t afford to see the originals or have some disabilities. Those apps can help understanding complicated conceptions and display facts in more attractive ways. But their implementation in learning process should be supervised from teachers and professors because it can also lead to misunderstanding, if they are not chosen wisely for the purpose of the lesson or audience.